So, I read the wikipedia page on parimutuel betting and felt like that presents a similarly predictive market without the complexities of trying to build a markets concept with trading and all the fun that comes from matching trades. I really got stuck last time on two elements:

The trading concept requires a lot of extra calculations and overhead, those lead to a complex system which leveraged a lot of contributed modules...

Happy Path Trading

The "happy path" is done (has been for a while actually). You can buy/sell portfolios of contracts. You can buy/sell individual contracts as long as the number you want to buy/sell matches perfectly with someone else. This is pretty exciting to me. I've even got some validation at order entry and trade execution to make sure things "good."

No code discussion here - just information on what prediction markets are. Especially in light of some recent criticisms from the Democratic New Hampshire primary election, this overview post on the Mercury blog is really informative. It walks through how to interpret prediction markets

One of the hardest things to do is understand how often you can lose when betting on a favourite. Let’s do some simple math:...95% - 1 in 20 favourites will lose

More refactoring

Pages

Project Status

This project is being developed completely in the open and recorded on this site. You can provide feedback as a comment on the blog posts. To get involved, contact me. The Drupal.org project page (for bug reports and feature requests is in the modules under Prediction Markets